Department of the english language and literature course paper

§ 2.2 THE RESTORATION
Literary reactions to the political climate
For some, the restoration of King Charles II in 1660 led many to a painful revaluation of the political hopes and millenarian expectations bred during two decades of civil war and republican government. For others, it excited the desire to celebrate kingship and even to turn the events of the new reign into signs of a divinely ordained scheme of things. Violent political conflict may have ceased, but the division between royalists and republicans still ran through literature of the period. Indeed, it is hard to conceive of a single literary culture that could include, on the one hand, John Milton and John Bunyan and, on the other, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, and John Dryden. Yet these and other such opposites were writing at the same time.[9]
The term Restoration literature is often taken to mean the literature of those who belonged, or aspired to belong, to the restored court culture of Charles II’s reign—the “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,” as Alexander Pope later put it. This identification was to allow Pope’s contemporaries to look back on the Restoration as an age of excess and licentiousness. Yet Puritans and republicans had not disappeared. With the Act of Uniformity (1662) and the Test Act (1673), those Protestants not conforming with the Church of England (“Dissenters”) were excluded from most public offices. However, they still formed an important body of opinion within the nation. They were also to make a distinctive contribution to the nation’s intellectual life throughout the following century.
In the first years after Charles II’s return, dissent was stilled or secretive. With the return of an efficient censorship, ambitiously heterodox ideas in theology and politics that had found their way freely into print during the 1640s and ’50s were once again denied publication. For erstwhile supporters of the Commonwealth, the experience of defeat needed time to be absorbed, and fresh strategies had to be devised to encounter the challenge of hostile times. Much caustic and libelous political satire was written during the reigns of Charles II and James II and (because printing was subject to repressive legal constrictions) circulated anonymously and widely in manuscript. Andrew Marvell, sitting as member of Parliament for Hull in three successive Parliaments from 1659 to 1678, experimented energetically with this mode, and his Last Instructions to a Painter (written in 1667) achieves a control of a broad canvas and an alertness to apt detail and to the movement of masses of people that make it a significant forerunner of Pope’s Dunciad, however divergent the two poets’ political visions may be. Marvell also proved himself to be a dexterous, abrasive prose controversialist, comprehensively deriding the anti-Dissenter arguments of Samuel Parker (later bishop of Oxford) in The Rehearsal Transprosed (1672, with a sequel in 1673) and providing so vivid an exposition of Whig suspicions of the restored monarchy’s attraction to absolutism in An Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government in England (1677) that a reward of £100 was offered for revealing its author’s identity.